Thursday, March 17, 2011

How much worse can it get?

55 comments:

Added new RNC chairman Reince Priebus in a Tweet: "How can @BarackObama say he is leading when puts his NCAA bracket over the budget & other pressing issues?"

Mr. Obama opened the ESPN segment by calling on Americans to go to usaid.gov and find charities through which they can make donations to the people of Japan. He said it would be a "great gesture" for Americans to donate, adding, "As you're filling out your brackets you can really help out some people who are going through a tough time."

You can see Mr. Obama's full NCAA men's basketball bracket here. On the women's side, Mr. Obama also picked all #1 seeds to reach the final four; his full bracket is here.

Three cowboys were seated around the campfire out on the lonesome sagebrush prairie, and with the pride for which these men were famous; it was a night of bravado, a night of tall tales.....

Tom, the hand from Wyoming says, 'I must be the strongest, meanest, toughest cowboy there is. Why, just the other day, a bull got loose in the corral. It had gored six men before I wrestled it to the ground by the horns with my bare hands and castrated that sucker with my teeth.'

Ben, from Oklahoma, couldn't stand to be bested. 'That's nothing, I was walking down the trail yesterday and a 15 foot diamondback rattler slid out from under a rock and made a move for me. I grabbed that bastard with my bare hands, bit off its head, and sucked the poison down in one gulp and didn't even get a belly ache.'

Old Bob, the cowboy from West Texas, remained silent, slowly stirring the campfire coals with his pecker…..

Dems face up to 14 years on fake filing xharges associated with the Tea Party in the 2010 election

Two former high-ranking members of the Oakland County Democratic Party are facing various election corruption charges in a bogus tea party scheme, Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper and County Sheriff Michael Bouchard announced Wednesday.

Former Democratic Party Chairman Michael McGuinness and ex-operations director Jason Bauer, both of Waterford Township, were arraigned Wednesday before Oakland Circuit Judge James Alexander.

They face charges related to Independent Tea Party filings, false affidavits and forged documents that occurred between July 23 and July 26 last year.

Both stood mute to the charges and were released on $25,000 personal bond each, pending an April 13 hearing before Alexander.

The charges include felonies that carry up to 14 years in prison. Neither could be reached for comment.

Eighteen months before Japan's radiation crisis, US diplomats had lambasted the safety chief of the world's atomic watchdog for incompetence, especially when it came to the nuclear power industry in his homeland, Japan.

If long life is a measure of success, things are not so bad, here in the United States of America.

AHN | All Headline News - ‎2 hours ago‎The death rate in the United States fell for the tenth straight year, according to federal statistics released this week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report also showed life expectancy in the United States increased to 78.2 years, ...

How much worse can it get?

That number could be moving the other way, if things were REALLY "bad".

Hundreds of Iraqis took to the streets in the holy Shi'ite city of Kerbala on Thursday to rally against the arrival of troops from Sunni power Saudi Arabia in Bahrain.

The Shi'ite ruling bloc in Iraq has denounced the deployment of troops from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in Bahrain, where a Sunni royal family has called in aid from its neighbors to help quell an uprising by mainly Shi'ite protesters.

Confrontation between Shi'ites and Sunnis in the Gulf risks worsening Iraq's own sectarian divide after years of war.

wow! What a powerful political statement that post was Deuce - juxtaposing pictures of Obama at leisure with pictures of disaster. oh sooooo compelling. Who could ever vote for the man after an expose like that!

Well Obama did mosey over to the Japanese embassy today and sign the condolences guest book, took up a whole page too. I would have thought he'd fly over to Tokyo just for the publicity. Whatever did happen to never let a crisis go to waste?

I've denounced the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform bill. However, unlike the GOP I have denounced it because it adds a massive new bureacracy while not going far enough in in curbing the abuses in the financial industry that brought us to the mess we are in today. In other words, that it lacks effective regulation of the crooks.

As for the humor I mentioned, the ABA has been asking the bank industry and its members to attend the GOP hearings on Dodd-Frank in D.C. (Almost seems a little like the bussed-in tactics Doug denounced when the Dems used it to get their people to rallys in WI, In, Oh, and Mi.)

At any rate, since the GOP don't believe they can stop Dodd-Frank, they are attempting to defund the regulatory agencies (primarily the SEC) in an effort to slow down implementation as much as possible.

Their professed reason: "To save jobs."

Humorous enough. However, the real humor came when Sheila Bair began explaining certain portions of the bill. We were then treated to the picture of a chamber packed with bankers dressed in three-piece suits hissing and booing the Director.

For any who still believe that U.S. foreign policy is handled on anything but an ad hoc basis ot that any positives that may accrue to us is anything more than dumb luck I offer the following:

The seeming collision of American interests was evident in 2009, when the State Department’s human rights report on Libya was a gruesome inventory of disappearances and torture. Months earlier, however, a diplomatic cable, obtained by the antisecrecy group WikiLeaks, called the Qaddafi government a “strong partner in the war against terrorism” and declared the relationship with Libya’s spy service “excellent.”

A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment about the agency’s ties to foreign intelligence services. But Michael Scheuer, who spent two decades at the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations, said it was absurd to believe that such work could be done without the help of unpalatable allies.

“Foreign policy and intelligence doesn’t have anything to do with values,” Mr. Scheuer said. “It has to do with material interests and security. We would be blind in most of the world if we only dealt with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”

Some former C.I.A. operatives believe that Libya’s help in counterterrorism has been overstated. Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of the C.I.A.’s Libya branch, said Colonel Qaddafi often tried to paint his political enemies as terrorists, and that the C.I.A. became “sucked in” to working with a ruthless government because the spy agency was desperate for information about potential militants.

“I understand that to get intelligence about bad people, you can’t just deal with nuns and Boy Scouts,” said Mr. Cannistraro. “But in the case of Qaddafi, you’re talking about dealing with a murderer...”

Years of procrastination in deciding on long-term disposal of fuel rods are now coming back to haunt Japan.

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Keeping the fuel pools topped up would have been achievable with easily airliftable rudimentary farm or construction equipment and widely available plumbing hardware prior to the site becoming a radioactive Hellhole.

In retrospect, it is becoming obvious that Tokyo Electric crews were basically on their own until after things had spiraled out of control.Kan's crews were largely absent prior to Tuesday.

No doubt most attention was taken by the monumental challenges elsewhere, and it was hoped/assumed that Tokyo Electric could handle the plants....if only they could have a do-over...

Preparing an SOP to prevent this ever occuring here would have been child's play in less litigeous times when engineers rather than lawyers had primacy.

Now Harry and The Won have wiped out decades of work toward addressing Nuclear Storage.

On a more serious note - do you have any evidence that Obama is kicking back playing golf and such when he should be out exercising his immense power and fixing things like the messed up Japanese reactors?

Sorry Ash, while I have to admit I thought Duece's extended post was a little overkill, I have to agree with it's main thrust.

Obama spending time on ESPN talking hoops with everything going on in the world right now indicates he is either tone deaf to public opinion or doesn't give a shit.

The question "What can he do?" is really not key? Whether he can do anything substantial does not effect the impression that he is basically disengaged.

Worse, U.S. policy appears ad hoc and unfocused. They are reluctant to do anything less they be blamed while at the same time mouthing whatever sound bites they think will allow them to take credit for any positives that may occur.

While I am agreement with you on the foreign policy issues I think there is little evidence that Obama isn't engaged. It reminds me of all the whining about Bush spending at his ranch in Texas - as if one were out of the loop and couldn't make decisions anywhere but whilst sitting in the Oval Office.

Given the recent security council decision it looks like another front will be taken up by the US in the pan arab war. I'll admit that it is far better that the administration has worked the multi-national route on this one but given the fiasco currently underway I'm not sure governing Libya is going to be much fun and profitable.

At a Senate hearing, Undersecretary of State William J. Burns agreed that actions would “include a no-fly zone but could go beyond them,” to include targeted air strikes, jamming of government communications signals and handing over internationally frozen Libyan government assets, including $32 billion in the United States alone, to the rebel leadership.

Burns confronted sharply differing views about the Libyan crisis that crossed party lines. Some, led by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), charged the administration has been too cautious in its response.

...

But Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), along with several committee Democrats, warned of the “risk that our involvement would escalate” and said the administration should “seek congressional debate on a declaration of war” against Libya before U.S. forces participate in any action.

AH... The arab/islamic occupiers of north africa are killing each other....

AND I HAVE NICE BUTTERY THEATER POPCORN!

On one side we have jew hating, israel hating, inbred goat fuckers (and for this one time I am not referring to the Bar's resident Jew hating, Israel hating goat fucker, Rat) and on the other side, we have Jew hating, Israel hating goat fuckers...

Both sides remind me of why we need to send condoms to the arab & islamic world...

Stay out of the conflict and for what we dont spend?

Invest in domestic energy exploration, mining and drilling...

Hard to pick a side...

As I have said, in 1783 we went war once with north africa moslems that had declared war on us...

From the Hall of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.

No more direct war on Libya, but no medicine, no food, no, money, no arms, no technology, no trade and certainly no tourism and no cultural exchanges.

Hacking and destroying any and all computers, infrastructure and communications is all game....

OK, I have popped by corn, time to start totaling the number of dead and wounded moslems across the globe (of course this only applies to moslem on moslem barbaric actions)

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.